Your “Now” Futures are all of the possible futures that you may experience from your “Now” that you are experiencing. Likewise, your “Now” Pasts are all of those possible pasts that could have led up to the “Now” you are experiencing. These “Now” Pasts and Futures are only a tiny fraction of all of your Pasts and Futures.

You may ask why it matters that there are Pasts that you could not have experienced and Futures that you can’t experience. It matters because by “experience” I mean in a classical sense – with the five senses. In a quantum sense you CAN (quantum) experience these Pasts and Futures. So now we have a different model where your quantum pasts and quantum futures are connected by your quantum now and your “Now” pasts and “Now” futures are connected by your classical now – your “Now” present.

All of your “Now” Pasts connect to all of your “Now” Futures through the Present Moment.

At first, I only wrote the title as “All of your Pasts connect to all of your Futures.” As I wondered if this were really true, and what the implications were, I struggled to see a way to convince myself it was true. Then as the blank page stared back at me as I sat in a lawn chair at Seacliff State beach, the answer popped into my mind. Your pasts are defined to be all of the possible pasts that are connected to your present moment. Your futures are defined to be all of the possible futures that are connected to your present moment. So your pasts and futures are connected by definition through your present moment.

As soon as I wrote this page, I realized there’s a problem with it. These are my “Now” Pasts and Futures. Let’s explore this …

Have you ever wanted to change your past? Well you can’t change the past you experienced, but that has only a tiny influence on your possible futures. What you can change are your possible pasts. Why would you want to do that you ask? Because your possible futures and their probabilities are determined by your possible pasts and their probabilities. If you change the probabilities of your pasts, you change the probabilities of your future!

Imagine yourself again in the big white room and instead of looking forward, rotate your chair around and look backward into your past one year ago. You will see a selfie that represents the universe you experienced, but you will also see selfies representing the universes you didn’t experience.

From the viewpoint of you in a particular universe, your possible futures and their probabilities are ever-changing. In fact, from any viewpoint they are as well. So going back to the big room with all of your futures represented as selfies on the wall, if you could stop time and sit in the room “outside” of the universe and look at your selfies, they would still be moving – the sizes of the selfies would be growing and shrinking ever so slightly. This is because time itself is quantized and the state of the universe can only be captured if “now” has a finite, although “small”, time duration. So there will be a fuzziness and uncertainty even of the probabilities of your futures.

Any two events have a connection strength. It doesn’t matter where (or when) the events are – they can be in the same time slice or different time slices. The connection strength between events is a measure of how likely both events would occur in a single classical universe in the same sequence order and time difference. This is a modeling construct and the length of each time slice will effect the strengths.

Remember that most events have a high total connection strength with past events and a low total connection strength with future events. So, to gain insight into your possible futures, pay attention to unexpected events which have a low connection strength with the past and a therefore high connection strength with the future.

By parallel, I means as in a parallel universe. The reality we live in is more interesting than it appears. This is because we can only classically experience one universe at a time. Previously, you imagined photos on a wall – each photo representing a possible future. Just as these exist in the future, they exist in the present and the past. For any slice of time, you could see and possibly calculate the probabilities of each of the events in that time slice from the probabilities of the events in the time slices before and after the time slice you are calculating. You would also need to know the “connection strengths” between events in different time slices (and in the current time slice).

In a Newtonian universe, you have one future and it is predetermined even if you can’t calculate it in practice. In theory, you could. Although given the complexity of the universe, you could argue that the universe is random. This could also be what you conclude from trying to predict the future of a quantum universe. The real question everyone wants to know is if the universe is controllable – and how to control it!

In the next few pages, I am going to describe a universe that contains an ever changing set of possible futures that extend forever into the time period that has yet to come.